Racism is again a burning issue in our country. One may define racism as the conviction that not all humans are equal, but that some are ‘worthier’ than others. Usually those who are regarded as ‘unworthy humans’ are not treated on par with the rest. The ‘othering’ of humans in the Western world did not commence in the 16th, 17th, 18th or 19th centuries. It is argued that the roots of racism in the Western world date back to the 1st (...) century CE when the early Christians severed their ties with the Jewish people and their religion, and started humiliating and denigrating them. Traces of this can be found in the New Testament in inter alia John 8:44, Revelation 2:9 and 3:9. The Jewish people and their synagogues were associated with the Devil. However, Paul also contributed to the anti-Judaism sentiments of early Christians. He argued that the gospel superseded the law. This eventually led to the conviction that Christianity superseded Judaism, and that Jews and Judaism ranked lower than Christians and Christianity. These beliefs created fertile soil for the development of racism in the Western world. The article presents a brief overview of the history of Christianity, how it developed, how it became the state religion of the Roman Empire and the dominant religion in the Western world, and how the religious convictions fed into the sociopolitical and economic policies of the Western world. The article delivers a plea for accepting the view that all religions are human constructs and that their adherents need to meet the ‘other’ on an equal footing. The Western world especially needs to look at how Christianity contributed to the way it treated other people during the course of history. (shrink)

Both Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion and Philip Kennedy’s book A Modern Introduction to Theology: New Questions for Old Beliefs were published in 2006. This article aims to compare the two books and to argue that Kennedy does not oppose Dawkins’s views but, in fact, debates along similar lines. Kennedy is adamant that the Augustinian paradigm of Christianity no longer makes sense, because it is based on an outdated cosmology and anthropology. He firmly maintains that Christianity requires a new (...) paradigm, which is informed by our current knowledge and worldview. Thomas Kuhn’s ideas of paradigm and paradigm changes in the history of natural sciences are utilised in comparing the books, seeing that Dawkins accepts and works within the Darwinian paradigm of evolutionary biology, and Kennedy argues that Christians and Christian theologians adhere to the Augustinian paradigm of Fall-Redemption-Judgement. It is argued that Dawkins should have referred to the paradigm change in the study of the Bible, which occurred towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, and the plea of theologians, like Kennedy, for a paradigm change in theology. The article concludes that only a paradigm change in Christianity, which is in line with the modern worldview, will enable Christians to keep the tradition alive. (shrink)